Bigotry’s abbot goes beyond the pale of legal redemption

Sunday, January 31, 2016

He may not have realised it yet, perhaps it may take some time for the light to shine through his burly, black, boorish brawn, but Bodu Bala Sena Chief Galagodaatte Gnanasara Thera is, no doubt, the darling of the foreign missionaries who use his mug to portray the ugly face of Buddhism.

Arrested Body Bala Chief Gnanasara Thera arrives in his Benz to face the music: Will he get his comeuppance this time around?

Neither may he have fathomed it yet, but he is also the pin up boy of the Tamil Diaspora who use his racist acts as the choreographed steps and his hate filled words as the heady music to dance their Eelam Rhapsody upon Lanka’s grave.

The more he attacked the Muslims in the name of singlehandedly protecting Buddhism in Lanka the more he became a Buddhist Ayatollah. The more he denigrated other races and other religions and threatened violence upon them, the more he turned Buddhism’s disciples to a fundamentalist Buddhist Taliban, ever ready to stain, without qualms, Buddhism’s saffron robe with blood.

The more he freighted his shabby doctrine to hot spots brimming with communal tension as he did when he went to Beruwela in June 2014; and the more he opened his sewers’ sluice gates, like he did at that same venue, and gave his pent up racist spittle and bigoted foam free flow and decreed the ‘final solution’ to the Muslims as their ordained punishment if even one Sinhalese was touched; the more he gave fodder to Eelamists the world over to nourish and sustain their utopian dream and justify to the world why it was impossible for the Tamils to live without fear in Lanka as equal citizens, with a majority race determined to exercise its racial superiority and allow no place in the sun for the minorities, be they Tamils or Muslims,

But fifteen years ago it was this same monk Galagodaatte Gnanasara, now meteorically raised to the heights of national infamy, who, whilst driving a car in a drunken stupor, knocked down a man who had to be rushed to hospital with a smashed leg. He was convicted for drink and driving, in the Colombo Magistrates (Road Motor Vehicle) Court in case No 6315/2000, including the charge, amongst nine, of not reporting the accident.

For one who claims that his every act is done in the name of the Buddha Sasana and that every adverse reaction to it is levelled against the Buddha Sasana, and that if there is any matter to be settled it must be settled then and there, Gnanasara Thera is quite averse to discussing the incident and told a television interviewer two years ago that it will be a waste of time to talk about it and to skip the subject which would otherwise take twenty minutes talk time to explain.

After remaining as a blessed nonentity for the nation’s good during the turbulent war years, he graduated to the big league when peace had dawned to raise the lion’s tail of Sinhala patriotism against a new racial foe, the Muslims; and launched the Bodu Bala Sena in a lavish ceremony from the BMICH under the Rajapaksa regime’s patronage with the declared aim of subjugating the Muslim minority through waves of terror.

Read More